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Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Christmas is here again. How time flies. It seems yesterday that I was writing to you last Christmas. I hope you are keeping well, studying well and playing well. I dream of you often and in my dreams, you have grown, with long arms and legs and ears. I have grown a little too. It will be so much fun when we do meet up.

The best part of writing to you is that perhaps this is one of the few places where I can be myself in all my madness. Thanks to all the people who follow my writing in other places, I often have to pretend to be very sane and wise. One should always try and be what one really is, no matter how impossible it might appear. At least some of the time, don’t you think?

All of this week, people have been demanding stronger sentences. While some like short sentences, others prefer longer ones. Many have been demanding the death sentence. The death sentence is actually quite simple. For example. Ravi Shankar died. Sheila Dixit promised stern action. Narendra Modi won. Sentences can be difficult but none are unbearable. None. Though you might be looking forward to a game, I would much rather listen to some music with you. Come with me. Santa Claus is for real.

I heard Ravi Shankar first on an album called West Meets East with the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, and to this day the enchanting experience is fresh in my memory. This was when I was very young, maybe 7 or 8, and I had no context for what I was hearing. I remember thinking of the sitar as a complex and large instrument compared to the sound of the violin. The picture of the two men on the LP cover is also still fresh in my mind. Both of them were lost in the intensity of their playing. I thought to myself that music was indeed a very strange thing. On one hand you had the temporality of rhythm which on the other you had the spatiality of melody and harmony. In 1967, West Meets East won the first of three Grammies that Ravi Shankar would eventually be awarded. I do not know if it happens to you, but I have a big problem of association as far as memories go, so at the cost of being called crazy (it is a valid psychological thingummy called synesthesia), I will also add that the Menuhin-Shankar music was purple, somewhat Friday and curly.